K.F.

i try not to post too much personal info, but this topic has been gnawing at me. partly because some responsibility or “inspiration” was wrongly imputed to me, and i continue to be a pariah amongst a group of people who happen to be the closest to my gene pool for simply living my life as i see fit within my realm of possibility.

i have been observing my cousin who left her children at tender ages try to tell her eldest daughter what to read, how to plan her life in the shallowest sense, by facebooking demands dressed up as motherly concerns. granted, men are just as capable of taking care of their children as women are, and their father certainly stepped up to the plate, but this particular abandonment was sudden, confusing, and more permanent than i initially thought. after she made a rare visit to me years ago, i somehow became her inspiration in a manic state she didn’t recognize as such. being manic myself with albeit some greater amount of control over it, i cooly tried to brush this off. however she claimed my not-putting-up-with-shit-from-men was inspiration for her seemingly sudden change of heart that manifested itself in leaving her marriage of 15 some odd years and three children. in one flash after a night of honky tonking, she found a boytoy she pretended to try to hook me up with, as if i was interested in the first place which i certainly was not, and made this life altering decision. mere weeks after the fact, she had driven across the country with another toy who ended up ruining her vehicle and conning her out of thousands of dollars from her divorce settlement. i started out sympathetic. i had no idea of her situation, who was i to judge? she married young and knew only that life for so long (although it was quite comfortable materially). i stuck up for her to other family who placed all the blame on her. i won’t go into her background for obvious reasons, but imagine the worst combination of things that could happen to a child that yet leaves them alive and breathing in the aftermath and you can get some idea. the other family have not viewed these damaging episodes as causation for the symptoms and ripples that continue today. so my heart went out to her. she is seven or eight years my senior, but even when we were young i found myself acting as her counselor while she was continually subjected to terrible situations. i was probably 12 when this started. however since my egg donor had begun treating me as a mini adult by the age of nine by explaining her marital woes to me, i was already at sophomore level in such affairs.

in the following years, i was on the receiving end of her passive aggressiveness for having any material possessions, even. “oh how i wish i had that much to spend” “oh now i wish i had that time” “oh how i wish i had received that gift”. having received similar treatment from a female sibling, it’s made me want to scream, however callous it may come across, “well i apologize to you for not choosing to have a brood of children by 35, what do you want me to do?” i know this is a #problematic attitude for a number of reasons, in the great scheme of things. on the personal level while trying to maintain connections with women who have encountered similar struggles and understanding that this whole society thing actually exists but not receiving the same good faith in return, it feels good to say, and there is some truth in it. i did not make similar choices about things i could control. they were not always better choices, but they were mine and this is my life, i’m not blaming you for anything so please god why do you want to displace this onto me. why? if there are things to work on, do it, and don’t pass it off on others. now i see this frustration passed onto her daughter, and i feel sorry for the girl. she is just a teenager and has been inundated with all these faux good intentions from narcissistic family members who find it within themselves to simultaneously demonize her mother in isolation and pressure and manipulate her into accepting their ideas of “forgiveness” of the same woman who abandoned her while nothing of significance is addressed with regard to her own mental soundness and well being.

i find this an important example now for a couple of reasons that i can think of as i type this. one, because it is too late in Kansas, at least, to make use of this type of protest to try to preserve the public commons. occupy made sure of that and sucked out the opportunistic who made the news to place them in the dem machine. there are no public services for the poorest, and no “activists” still there care. they have their positions and can, for a little while longer at least, put the “symbolic” salve on their nonprofit efforts. i’ve posted on this for years, and while i understand the mechanics of capitalist state welfare, i found it much more important to try to bring attention to what was being taken away than sign on fully with this abstract anti-this-ism occupy inspired. 

tw: suicide

i woke up wanting to listen to Nirvana which i haven’t done in a while. i don’t know anyone my age who didn’t listen to Nirvana. they were everywhere after a time and quite raw for being so popular. i remember really getting to liking them after seeing them perform on Saturday Night Live in the very early 90s before Cobain was quickly killed off. i wasn’t supposed to watch the show but i smuggled our tiny uhf/vhf television to my room, and it did seem like a watershed moment for people my age, however synthetic that may have been. 

what was marketed as grunge under this mantle turned into a mindset and a lifestyle of sorts for already disaffected young americans. i accept the work done into the conspiracy around Cobain’s death rather than his rather timely offing of himself. some researchers have looked into the spikes of suicides of young people after that, however i’m not sure how much is this is excited speculation or truly scientific. in any case the realism Cobain embodied was easily appropriated. i think his death was a staged spectacular and traumatic event to target and demoralize his fan base. i think this is comparable to what has been done with Miley Cyrus. she was a wholesome household product marketed as Hannah Montana turned into a drugged out whore caricature. there are many examples of using celebrity artists in this way. 

in my memory, the 90s seemed like a truly different time for music and its immediate availability to the fans on a large scale. however now that i’m on the east coast this doesn’t seem so anachronistic as there are talented acts that come through tiny bars, but the level of gentrification has allowed for these establishments to brand themselves as exclusive. additionally the removal and ignorance of more community based advertising for these concerts has been replaced by the internet so it alienates and atomizes fans and people simply wanting to socialize at these events. 

i remember going to honky tonks in the midwest before i was the age of majority and seeing grunge acts that received national radio airtime. in a sort of ironic twist, after getting out of a Candlebox concert, my friend turned on a band called Oleander (with his CD player ofc haha) that i hadn’t heard of. he was a sharp guy and just winked at me before he played it. i freaked and said omg is this Kurt? we listened through and just sort of shrugged. a forgettable ruse.

today i compared Oleander and Nirvana. with the traumatizing effect in mind, how cheap does Oleander’s heavy-handed imitation sound? the lyrics are a slap in the face as well -- goldilocks bullshit that sounds like mockery compared to the depth Nirvana really did have before they became a mundane subject of “dad rock” to poke fun at in the internet age. doing so is a piece of social capital to flash in many online communities. we’re very much past that, having heroes and demigods set up by the same people who take joy in destroying them once the disaffected form affection for them.

https://youtu.be/1ewuKGRVEQM

TW: pedophilia, rape

Dr Phil with a viewership of however many million claims he (sensationally) covers the topics he does for educational purposes. and speaking of education, a favored topic of the show is conventionally attractive female teachers and their male “lovers” (students, but he actually does pose it this way). i am working on a longer post that addresses the liberal complaint about how unfortunate it is that some people are “hard wired” “by nature” to be pedophiles and how thought terminating this premise is. in any case, my argumentation rests on the glaringly obvious fact that adults cannot form “sexual relationships” with minors or children. any thinking person will agree with my words of course, but western mass culture chips away at this so much that there are plenty of nicely paved avenues to travel down and use to explain away the exact definitions that should be present in an equitable society. acting on this compulsion manifests from a desire to dominate using sexuality to do so. a child does not have the capacity to consent to a relationship with an adult, and there is no room for ambiguity here. 

but the blurring of terms -- the shock troops that literally uncovered Miley Cyrus in recent years after she was heavily marketed to young girls for her “wholesome” image come to mind -- includes these sorts of seemingly innocent, flippantly phrased descriptors such as “teenage lovers” to demonstrate the “disturbing reality” of this phenomenon that is in reality a perennially marketed male fantasy. so in effect it’s a furtherance of this desire, and Dr Phil brings on the biggest idiots his team can find who in a way put on display how not to do it if you want to get away with it.

let me tell you how this operated in my small school growing up, and i don’t think this history is unique or set apart from the average american small town high school. i knew of two male teachers who statutorily raped girls starting from when we were sophomores. one slept with two girls. another was able to publicly confirm his “relationship” with one of my peers at the graduation party her parents hosted. there were two couples i knew of, one that was involved with the school board and the other both teachers at our school, who had “open relationships” with each other. the women in these heterosexual partnerships were openly flirtatious with male students. our biology teacher would be in a state of half undress during extracurricular activities around male students and paid more attention to them than any female students. it was a big orgy if you were part of the club in good graces with the small petty bourgeoisie of the town, and if you were able to maintain some amount of deniability, there were no worries about ever being the subject of trash talk television. 

the idiots who fall outside are local news story pariahs because of this. it may be unspoken or implicit when it happens, but the pattern is fairly predictable. perhaps with the attractive women who get caught with their hands down their students’ pants it’s a convenient cover with its primetime raciness. and it represents the larger power dynamic at work that is being normalized in greater strides as things like “false memories” become a thing of the past. everything old is made new again and we are taught to forget. 

A pressing of the proper button brought the bed sliding out from the wall, virtually to fill the room; it had been his living room and now it was his bedroom. Four hours, he said to himself as he set the mechanism of the bed’s clock. He lay down, made himself comfortable -- as much so as the inadequate bed permitted -- and groped for the toggle switch that induced immediately and powerfully the most profound sleep state possible.

A buzzer sounded.

The damn dream circuit, he said to himself. Even early like this do I have to use it? He leaped up, opened the cabinet beside the bed and got out the instructions. Yes, mandatory dreaming was required at any time he used the bed ... unless, of course, he threw the sex lever. I’ll do that, he said to himself. I’ll tell it I’m having knowledge in the Biblical sense of a female person.

Once more he lay down and activated the sleep switch. 

“You weigh one hundred and forty pounds,” the bed said. “And there is exactly that weight extended over me. Therefore you are not engaged in copulation.” The mechanism voided his throwing of the sleep toggle switch, and at the same time the bed began to warm up; the heating coils in it blatantly glowed beneath him.

He could not argue with an angry bed. So he turned on the sleep-dream interaction and shut his eyes, resignedly. 

Sleep came at once; it always did: the mechanism was perfect. And, at once, the dream -- which everyone anywhere in the world who was now asleep was also dreaming -- clicked on.

One dream for everyone. But, thank god, a different dream each night.

“Hello, there,” a cheerful dream-voice declared. “Tonight’s dream was written by Reg Baker and is called In Memory Engraved. Now remember, folks: send in your dream ideas and win huge cash prizes! And if your dream is used you receive an all-expense paid trip off Earth entirely -- in any direction you desire!”

...that’s presented as far out psychedelic trip to young, impressionable minds but is really kind of scary.

comparing the capitalist trend of surreal trash to the much more imaginative Soviet and Korean varieties of animation from years gone by is enough to make people ask “what the fuck happened here” when viewing so much of even the most seemingly benign animation crafted for young audiences in the states and other western countries. but this is an example of more idiotic mind numbing and traumatizing garbage.